Know When To Hold 'em

WORD WATCH

June 04, 2004|By ROB KYFF

In case you haven't noticed, the game of poker has hit the popularity jackpot. Everyone, it seems, is playing poker, watching poker or denouncing poker. Not surprisingly, our language has followed suit.

The most popular version of the game is ``No-Limit Texas Hold 'Em,'' which sounds like something you'd order in a diner (an acre of scrambled eggs served between slices of Texas toast?).

Then there are the players' names. The recently crowned World Series of Poker champion is Greg ``Fossilman'' Raymer, so dubbed because he arranges fossils on the table in front of him (and, no, I don't mean the Rolling Stones). Last year's winner was, I kid you not, Chris Moneymaker.

But poker's real linguistic payoff has been its enrichment of the American vocabulary. From FDR's ``New Deal'' to bureaucrats who ``pass the buck,'' poker has given English a full house.

Can you supply the correct poker term for each sentence?:

1. Poker players who pretend to have five cards of the same suit (a flush), but really have only four, led us to call anyone who makes a false claim a ____________.

2. Money lost by a poker player to the house was once slipped through a hole in the middle of the table and collected in a box, so we still say someone who has lost money is _ ___ ____.

3. Players sometimes choose to keep their original, or pat, hand rather than discard and draw more cards, so we now say anyone who maintains a fixed position ______ ___.

4. Skilled pokerists hold their cards close to hide them from opponents, so we say that anyone concealing information is playing it _____ __ ___ ____.

5. Frontiersmen from Pike County in eastern Missouri who migrated to the card-playing mining camps of California in 1849 were notorious for not risking a lot of money in poker games, so we still call a cheapskate or tightwad a _____.

6. Western poker players passed around a knife with a buckhorn handle to show whose turn it was to deal or ante, which is why we say someone who shifts responsibility to someone else is _______ ___ ____.

7. Poker players who hold the middle cards of a straight (a 3, 4 and 5, for example) try to draw the end cards needed to complete the straight (2 or 6). This gave us a phrase for setting opposing interests against each other to achieve a goal: _______ ____ ____ _______ ___ ______.

Answers: 1. four-flusher 2. in the hole 3. stands pat 4. close to the vest 5. piker 6. passing the buck 7. playing both ends against the middle

Rob Kyff is a teacher and writer in West Hartford. Write to him in care of The Courant, Features Department, 285 Broad St., Hartford, CT 06115, or by e-mail at WordGuy@aol. com.